


Three's a Crowd

by Uniasus



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Feels, Gen, Post-Movie(s), but I remember reading something about doll souls on io9 so...., totally bs'ed that thing about shintoism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 13:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2026638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Uniasus/pseuds/Uniasus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two people, two sets of memories. But this memory doesn't belong to either of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three's a Crowd

**Author's Note:**

> Watched the movie recently, loved it, as I do many robot movies, and had to write this. Of course, it was only after I was about halfway through this did I remember Gipsy's actually spare parts on an alien world. Opps? Fanfiction people. Somehow, she was recovered and repaired (again). I'm gonna say her head made it out, pushed out of the breach like a cannon ball from a cannon. And then I re-watched it again in the midst of writing and realize I remembered the HUD wrong. Again, fanfiction. ^_^ 
> 
> Still, hope you enjoy it.

"Gipsy Danger, what's wrong? You're out of sync."

"Is it Mori again? I thought she learned not to follow the memories."

"No, it's Beckett."

"Strange."

"You're telling me."

"Gipsy Danger, what's wrong? Answer us. Mori? Beckett?"

"Something's wrong with Raleigh. He's not answering when I call his name."

"Ranger Raleigh Beckett, this is Marshal Hansen. Tell us what is going on! What's wrong with this Drift?"

"Right hemisphere disengaged. Beckett's left the Jaeger. Left hemisphere now, too. Mori's going after him."

"Shit. That boy needs to learn how to communicate!"

* * *

Raleigh stormed out of Gipsy's head. The techs reached to take off his suit but he brushed them off. He didn't want to be touched right now.

"Raleigh! Raleigh!"

He ignored Mako's calls and sped up his walk. People tried to speak to him as he stomped down the hallways towards his room, but-as with his pilot partner- he paid them no attention. The only thing Raleigh needed right now was time to himself, to figure out what the hell it was he just saw before he could answer any type of questions that he knew people would ask.

"Becket."

Marshal Hercules Hansen, director of the Jaeger Project, was striding down the hall towards him. Raleigh glanced to the door to his room. He was closer to it than Herc, he could make it. Raleigh started for it. "Not in a mood to talk."

"Too bad. You can't just cut off a Drift like that! You have to communicate with the technicians. You know this."

"Not in a mood for a dressing down either."

"Raleigh." Herc moved faster than Raleigh realized he could, for the ex-pilot was gripping his arm. "I'm familiar with the Drift, I know what kind of flashbacks it can bring up. But you shouldn't be having anything like that now. You told me you got over Yancy. And anything before him never affected your Drift before. What made this time different?"

Raleigh twitched at the mention of his brother's name and pulled his arm away. 

"I said I'm not in the mood to talk." 

He slipped inside his room and tried to slam the door, but it was too heavy to get the right amount of inertia. It still shut before Hans could get a word in, or rather, the older man took the swinging door as the cue it was and left Raleigh alone.

Finally surrounded by the peace he was seeking, Raleigh collapsed into his bed and cried.

* * *

The first time it happened, he thought it was odd. And also not real. It was his mind playing tricks on him and misremembrance of an older fight. But then it happened a second time, and then a third. Memories, all of kaiju fights, seen from a different angle then his should have been from his spot in Gipsy. 

So they had to be someone else's memories and that thought scared him.

* * *

When the knock sounded on his door, Raleigh realized he had been lost in his thoughts for hours. Though his tears had stopped and dried a while ago, he could feel their tracks on his skin. He stood up stiffly, washed his face, and then opened the door to a concerned looking Mako.

"It's dinner time, are you hungry?" She glanced at his clothes and he realized he was still in his suit. 

"Not really, but I should get this taken off." He stepped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him. As he expected, Mako kept pace with him. 

That was the thing about Drift compatible people. You got to know each other well-to a certain extent. She had seen all of his memories, enough to know that he did best with silence until he needed to talk, but she didn't know much about how those memories affected him as a person. Values, preferences, dreams, thoughts, and emotions. Those all had to be shared in the typical manner - talk. 

Men don't talk.

Mako didn't seem to know that bit of information.

"I'm confused," she began, eyes straight as they walked along. "None of the main memories that surfaced during today's Drift were very intense. They also were not new. What caused you to slip out of sync with me?"

"Nothing, Mako."

With a huff, she took a large step forward and placed herself solidly in front of him. Mako Mori did not look intimidating, most short Japanese women don't, but Raleigh had not only seen her memories of training but had also sparred with her many times. They were evenly matched. 

"You kept asking when you first came here why I could not be your partner. Now it's my turn. What happened earlier?"

"Last time, you also didn't give me a real answer."

"I did too, it just wasn't one you liked."

With a sigh, Raleigh crossed his arms. He didn't want to talk about his conclusions about what he had seen, but the thing was he wasn't the only one who had. Mako had too, she just didn't know it.

"Raleigh, please. We're partners. We have to work together to pilot Gipsy. And we're the only functioning jaeger right now, so we have to make sure nothing gets in the way of the Drift. What happened?"

She had him there. 

"Look, not here. I'm not sure others should know."

"Pretty sure I should. Let's talk in here." Herc was leaning against his doorframe. Raleigh hadn't realized they were near his quarters. 

Raleigh looked the Marshal up and down, deliberating. As the director, Raleigh wasn't inclined to tell Marshal Hansen. But as Hercules, the man who not only was familiar with the Drift but with loss, maybe he could shed some light on the issue. Maybe he would tell Raleigh he was crazy for even thinking what he was. Make him see rational thought. 

"Okay."

* * *

It was a little less cramped than his own quarters, but then again Herc wasn't just a jaeger pilot now. He was in charge of the program. It came with a move from a box room to a box suite that lacked doors. 

"Sit." Herc motioned to the pair of chairs in front of the desk in the front room while he settled into a lean against the front of the desk, staring at Raleigh. 

There was no way he wasn't getting out of this talk.

"Today wasn't the first time something odd has happened in the Drift." Mako stifled a noise of protest and Raleigh unheeded it to continue. "It's just that today was the first time I figured I wasn't just making things up."

"Making what up?"

"Some of the memories, they aren't ours." He waved a hand to indicate him and Mako, but kept his eyes on Herc.

The ex-pilot shook his head. "That's not how the Drift works."

"Raleigh, what are you talking about? We've synced enough times now new memories are only those that happen here, created between Drifts. I haven't seen anything else."

"I'm not surprised you haven't noticed, it took me awhile too." Raliegh leaned forward to place his elbows on his thighs and twined his fingers together between his legs. "These new memories are very similar to mine, to old ones from at least six years ago, but aren't."

"How do you know they aren't just forgotten ones?"

"Because I remember every kaiju fight I've been in, with hyper detail. And these new memories...."

"You think they're Yancy's," Herc said solemnly.

Raleigh nodded. "It's the angle of the memories. Same event, different view. What else could it be?"

"Are you sure about this?" Mako put a hand on his shoulder and he looked up at her. 

"Yes. No. Maybe. It's..." Complicated? Sad? Depressing? It freaked him out, what if these 'new memories' weren't even real? Could too much time in the Drift turn you crazy? Could the Drift mess with your memories? But his brother had died while they had been synced in the Drift. Raleigh had felt the pain of Yancy's death, and with it the unstableness of Gipsy Danger that was associated with an unsyncronized Drift. But the connection hadn't been switched off like it had been when they left the jaeger at slightly different times, or wavering like when they were first figuring out how to do it. It had faded, slowly, Yancy's mind still firmly attached to his.

It was that feeling alone that held Raleigh back from searching for Yancy's body and hoping it would still be breathing.

The conversation had gone on without him for a little bit, and when he tuned back in Herc was quizzing Mako on what memories she had seen this past drift. 

"Nothing up front was new to me, not really. It was a childhood memory, a kaiju fight, one of working on the Wall. The childhood memory didn't even feature Yancy, it was during school, so I don't think something could have triggered it."

"Do you think it's possible?" Raleigh broke in. "That if someone dies while connected to the Drift, part of them stays there?"

Was Yancy still alive and with him, in a weird way? Had he been avoiding Drifting, something he'd be doing to honor the connection he'd had with his brother, for no reason?

Raleigh did not appreciate the looks that he got from the other two in the room. Mako was looking at him with pity, Herc with longing. Chuck hadn't died while in the Drift, he and Pentecost had disengaged. 

"We've used the Drift as a technology for not much more than fifteen years." Herc said after a moment, voice in Marshal-lecture mode. "It works, but there hasn't been many studies about the effects of it on humans. And even then, the pool of possible subjects - jaeger pilots - is so small that it might not help much in discovering generalities. Plus, there are theories abound about what the Drift actually is. A psychic connection all humans have the possibility to have but we need technology to tap into, a forced syncing of neurons firing, some aether element or phenomena that only certain pairs can use. There are too many unknowns."

"But what do you believe? As a pilot?"

Mako's face made him believe her answer was no. Herc's was a hopeful, yet doubting yes.

"Raleigh, you're special among pilots. Not only are you the only one alive who's piloted a jaeger alone with limited long term effects, you're the only pilot who survived a synced death. Usually both pilots go within days of each other. "

Earlier, he had wanted Herc to dismiss this idea as folly, but now that the other man wanted on some level for it to be true Raleigh found himself latching stubbornly on to the idea. He knew all the sayings, as long as you remembered someone and kept them in you're heart they would never really be gone. But that was bullshit. Yancy was gone, plain and simple and the pain was awful. Memories were the ghost of a substitute. But this, this was proof that Yancy had been alive and wasn't entirely gone. Some of his memories were in Raleigh's brain.

Who cared why they had taken five months back in Gipsy Danger to come forward, or why they only showed up in Drift and not in dreams?

This was a piece of his brother. That was all that mattered.

* * *

The next morning at breakfast, Newt sat across from Raleigh and dropped a small stack of papers in front of his tray. 

"What's this?"

"Every single research paper that even mentions the word 'Drift'. Hansen said you'd want to read them. Don't know why, most of it is about the development of the technology that created it, and the creation of the two pilot system, which really is amazing and the three pilot system the Chinese favor doesn't have much benefit over it. Still -"

"Newt, thanks. I'm interested in reading them all."

He expected to be left to eat his breakfast in peace, at least for a little while because Mako had just walked into mess, but instead the scientist sat down and leaned so far forward that Raleigh felt a little uncomfortable. The man had always made Raleigh feel unease with his love of kaiju, but ever since he had Drifted with the beasts the feeling had intensified. 

"Hansen also said that Hermann and myself were to not only supervise, but record the stats of your Drifts from here on out and conduct a few interviews for a case study."

"A case study."

"You know, a type of scientific experiment were you get real deep into the life of a person, or a group, and analyze it."

"And Marshal Hansen told you to use me as a case study."

"Sorta. He mentioned how if we knew more about the properties of the Drift, how it would work better with other species. Can't really Drift with a kaiju anymore, you stopped my supply, but I could do it with other aliens maybe. Or even animals here. I wonder what my mother's cat thinks of her." 

Raliegh watched Newt think with a smile of amusement. He had never pegged Herc as a crafty person, but he must have picked up a few tricks in the years he was on the Wall. Mentioning to Newt that drift studies would benefit him, most likely slipping in a comment about Raleigh being a good subject. And only, as he and Mako were the only Drifting jaeger pilots. The fact that he was now a vessel for his brother's memory could be hidden for a while and Raleigh was glad for that option. He wanted to treasure that knowledge, those memories, by himself for as long as he could.

* * *

It was awhile until Gipsy's next mission. The kaiju were gone, but the jaeger project was being reinstated anyway. Giant robots could be used for everything from storm rescue to construction work. Away from cities of course. Jaegers were not built with narrow streets in mind. 

They were also denied permission in any type of military mission. PPDC had been a unified front for the world and they weren't going to risk that by having the few jaegers left choose sides. 

In this case, the mission was building an impromptu seawall on an Indonesian island. Meteorologists were predicting a hurricane to hit it in a week, and while most of the island would be evacuated by then the natives would prefer to not return to flattened homes. 

It was easy; go in and pile boulders on top of each other in the shallows for a few hours. 

The only thing that made it atypical was Marshal Hansen observing them getting their suits removed. Raleigh kept his eyes on the technicians, knowing Herc was looking for evidence of something having happened during the Drift that the instrument readings didn't pick up on. But there was nothing Raleigh could tell him. There was no new memory, no shift in perspective, or even a double one once as he thought about a memory from one viewpoint while it happened from another. 

There was no Yancy in his head this time, a non-event that makes Raleigh feel depressed and he doesn't want others to know that. He doesn't look at Hansen, only briefly looks at Mako as she talking, and when Newt pulls him into an elevator and hits the button for the lab level Raleigh talks about the reality of what happened this Drift and not what he had hoped to happen.

* * *

"Gipsy, what's going on? You're both out of alignment."

"Mori, Becket, you haven't been out of sync this bad since your first time, what's happening?"

"Is it normal for the graph to be that color?"

"No. Now get out of the way to I can try to figure it out."

"But I need to know for -"

"I can explain it later!"

"Mori! Becket! Answer us!"

"Tendo, shut it down!"

#####

When they opened the pod, Herc was the first one through the door. Raleigh and Mako were passed out, slumped in their harnesses and were oddly in sync with their breath and eye movements. Not uncommon for a Drift session, but it should have been forced to end.

"They're no longer shaking hands, right?" he asked a random assistant standing by. 

"Not according to the system."

"Whoa! That's new." Newt was crouching over Mako, switching his gaze from her to Raleigh and then making notes in a notebook. "Synchronized mircomovements even after Drift is terminated," he dictated as he wrote. But even as he said that, Raleigh took a huge gulp of air as he came awake. Mako followed shortly, chest heaving before staring wide-eyed at Raleigh. 

"What was that?!" Herc demanded. 

"I, we, Gipsy-"

"You have to tell me everything!" Newt demanded.

"Of course," Mako said. "But here is not the place."

Herc had forgotten about the curious techs. The Shatterdome would be filled with rumors in a matter of minutes, but if this had anything to do with what Raleigh had talked to him about earlier it was best if the truth stayed hidden. There was the risk of the United Nations pulling Raleigh Becket from the program, and without him the PPDC would be worthless. At least for another year until a new jaeger was built and pilots selected for it.

"I'm not sure we should move you guys just yet so, all of you!" He directed his voice to the staff in the room tasked with getting pilots ready for a Drift. "Clear out for an hour."

They obeyed, though several obviously wanted to stay. Herc left Newt to get vitals from Raliegh and Mako, information was important after all. Instead, he focused his attention on disabling the surrounding cameras in the pod and adjacent room. No one else had to hear what the up coming conversation was going to be. Or see it to lip read.

* * *

When Herc returned to the pod, Mako and Raleigh were sipping water from bottles Newt had found somewhere. They both looked white, nervous, and Herc knew that whatever they saw was serious. And had nothing to do with Yancy. Before, Raleigh had looked at peace, if in an insecure way, when talking about seeing Yancy's memories. Now, he looked a little terrified, sad, and awed. He kept looking up at the ceiling while taking sips of water.

Mako on the other hand was shaking her head and muttering to herself in Japanese, ignoring Newt who was still checking their vitals. 

"What happened?" Herc barked out. It came out as a Marshal’s order in his fear and urgency, but he was really asking as man who had seen Mako grow and followed Raleigh’s career. As a friend. 

This Drift had scared the pilots and that scared him. 

"What did you see?" He asked softer. 

Raliegh answered, looking out of Gipsy's visor. "Me."

"There's more to it than that," Newt pressed, almost vibrating with excitement.

"I saw myself, in Alaska, after....after Knifehead."

Silence. 

You never saw yourself in memory, you were yourself. For Raleigh to see himself, it would have to be in his co-pilot's memory. But it the memory was in Alaska, it couldn't be Mako's. And if it was after Knifehead, after Yancy died, it couldn't be his either even if those memories were bouncing around in Raleigh's head.

"You saw the memory of a third person?" Newt asked. "I never personally believed that the Drift was an open psychic connection between humans, it's called a neural handshake for a reason, but no one's been sure of anything. Do you think you can identify whose memory it was?"

Herc wanted him to say it belonged to Pentecost, because he liked the idea of entering a Drift and finding a part of his son. 

Mako looked around the pod, at Raleigh who had moved his gaze to the top of the pod (and that made it hard to read his face), and then finally to him as if he was the only one who could fully understand what she was going to say.

But it was Raleigh who answered, still looking up, in a voice Herc would associate with a vampire. Dead but for a spark of life.

"We saw me collapse, in a white pilot suit, on the Alaskan cost. And then an an old man sent his grandson running for help. It was...right after Knifehead, and the view was from the side, just higher than head height. At that time, from that view - it was Gipsy. Gipsy's memory."

* * *

"But...jaeger's are just metal suits. They don't even have a central processing unit." Newt shook his head. Because a jaeger having their own memories? Slash that, saved recordings of previous sensor readings? That can be accessed through a Drift? It was impossible.

Drifting with a kaiju brain was labeled as impossible, but he still did it because he knew the science and math of it showed a slight possibility. But this? A jaeger memory, a jaeger memory from a time when it should have been off line and dark, when it's pilots were not linked to it? It implied self-control, to turn those sensors on, and that required a mind, an intelligence. Jaegers did not have that. Jaegers were implants and tools, like an exoskeleton, that couldn't work on their own.

"They're just metal suits," he repeated. But the three other people in the room didn't look like they believed him.

He chalked it up as a pilot thing, because jaegers couldn't have memories.

Something else was going on. Dissociative memory perhaps from Mako. He'd get the details. He'd get the answers.

* * *

That night, as he laid in his bed, Raleigh went over Yancy's memories in his head. The kajiu fights from a different angle. He did remember them all in hyper detail, at least the view shown on the HUD. But looking over his memories, the structure of Gipsy's head is still there. Fuzzy and blurry because the important part is the monster stomping towards them, but there. Yancy's memories lack that. It's a pure view of the kaiju, no frame.

It's not a memory of Yancy looking at the HUD like he had wanted, needed. It's a memory of a direct viewing through visual sensors. It's Gipsy. 

Raleigh cried himself to sleep with silent sobs, because it felt like he lost his brother a second time.

* * *

Usually when Mako couldn't sleep, she'd go work out. But tonight she knew exactly what was keeping her up and so made her way to a balcony level with Gipsy’s head. Logically, she knew that most of Gipsy's hardware was in her chest and that if anything was her brain and head, but Mako needed to look at the crystal pane on the pod. The part that looked like a human face because that was familiar even if everything else she knew about Gipsy was shattering. 

Everyone was familiar with AIs. Movies and books turned them into dangerous creatures, whose logically processing made wrong decisions for the right reasons. Good ones were rare, and even rarer stayed good for multiple parts of a franchise. Scientists, of whose many projects she had read in her training to be a pilot and research to restore Gipsy Danger, had never actually managed to create one. Sure, the if/then clauses got pretty complex and the software could imitate experts in certain fields, but outside of that they were useless. Talk to the one in charge of monitoring ocean waves and water displacement to search for kaiju about what a runny nose and sore throat meant and it would just tell you it didn't understand. 

But memories? They didn't have that. Just examples of previous events.

And yet at the same time, she didn't know anyone who didn't personify jaegers. The heavy metal girls. 'Look at this punch here' or 'See how smooth her steps are, her pilots are very in sync' and similar phrases were thrown out in academy lectures. And once you talk to the pilots and crew on a jaeger team...

'Echo's the only gal for me.' 'Make sure you pay special attention to rinsing her knees, she's finicky there.' 'She favors a right plasma cannon.' 'Man, she was a bit cranky today.' 

Mako did the same thing. Talked about Gipsy as if she was a fellow woman, thought about her as one. She needed a bit of a kick to get going, that first step needing a tiny bit of extra force to get her joints working properly. And when coming back from a mission, a nice slow walk was best for letting parts settle to give the crew the most accurate readings and easiest time to clean her. 

Gipsy Danger wasn't really alive, but they treated her as such. 

And sometimes that was all it took. 

Stacker had done his best to raise her in accordance with her original culture, and the Shinto religion believed that items that were well-loved for many years developed souls of their own. And Gipsy Danger was the oldest, most worked on jaeger in the program. And perhaps because of that, the most loved. 

Could she have developed a soul, some type of consciousness? Mako found the idea not that disturbing.

* * *

Raleigh hated seeing Gipsy like this, armor plating open and her innards exposed. It reminded him of dead dogs on the road he would pass following the Wall, ripped apart by the starving animals still on the coast. It reminded him of how he had almost lost her during Operation Pitfall. 

The other workers were looking over in interest, stripping a jaeger down was beyond rare, and Raleigh knew rumors were flying through the Shatterdome as to why Gipsy was getting such a treatment. The story they were passing around was that it was faulty equipment, ill-installed during her extensive repairs that had caused the most recent Drift issue. And that yes, it was necessary to inspect the cables in her feet even though they weren't related to the Drift system at all. 

Obviously, no one fully believed them and so theories were flying, but no one knew the truth aside from himself, Herc, Mako, Newt, and Hermann. Tendo too, because Raleigh had to tell him. He had spent as much time with Gipsy Danger has he had, longer actually. She was as much his girl as Raleigh's.

"It won't be that much longer," one of the crew said and Raleigh nodded to show he heard. They'd already started putting the pieces back, after a check and cleaning. 

"Let me know when you're polishing her armor? I want to help."

"Sure thing."

The tech walked off and Raleigh continued to just look at the jaeger in front of him. He and Yancy had always joked about Gipsy having a personality, something he now shared with Mako. But it had always been that. A joke. But if Gipsy was alive, and Drifting with him and Mako, that was someone intruding in his head that he hadn't given permission to. 

And that, he figured, was the issue. The idea of a living jaeger unsettled him a bit-who wouldn't be at the thought- but it was the breach of privacy, the suddenness of a third presence in what was supposed to be a duet that really got to him. Drifts were a personal thing.

He agreed to let Mako into his head, encouraged it actually, though it took a lot effort to be personally willing to do that. But Gipsy, the girl who was the source of both his sorrow and joys? The machine with a nuclear reactor for a heart? The mechanical system, that if suddenly self-aware and in control, could kill him if it wanted too?

He liked Gipsy Danger more when she was just a metal suit.

* * *

After stripping and putting Gipsy back together, Mako and Raleigh Drifted again. He was nervous about it, still not sure about the idea of Gipsy having memories and using them to crack into a Drift with two humans, but one look from Herc had him in the dive suit. 

Raleigh read the papers Newt had handed him. He knew the theories. The idea that a third presence could break into a Drift bond was special. It hinted at the idea that the tech enables it, not creates it. And if that was the case, could the pilots of different jaegers, once they were built, Drift for seamless communication between units? Could Tendo Drift with them, limiting the need to report to the Shatterdome? Could Yancy, and Chuck and Pentecost, still be accessible some how?

He thought of that instead of the idea of Gipsy being alive.

* * *

It was a memory of nothing special, just a chopper flight over the ocean. Mako saw the approaching base; the unfamiliar shape indicated that it was Anchorage and not Hong Kong. She picked up the trick from Raleigh, to look for the blurry lights and shapes of the HUD border to distinguish between his memory and Gipsy's. There were none, so this was Gipsy's eyes she was looking through.

Knowing that the jaeger was alive and had her own memories, that this one was one, had her trying to compare Gipsy's point of view to hers. She expected a difference in height to adjust to, the wide array of scanners on her head to change the width and depth of vision. But there was nothing to indicate that this wasn't a human memory. No wonder Raleigh had thought he was seeing Yancy's memories, there was nothing about this that screamed 'jaeger'. 

Until, and she shamefully realized that she had followed the memory instead of letting it flow past her, Mako saw the docking procedure. Robotic arms that had always been stories above her were now at shoulder level and humans looked so tiny.

She shouldn't try to, it was a stupid idea, but just like the Drift allowed her mind and Raleigh’s to become one Mako tried to merge with Gipsy's mind - where ever it was. She failed, all she connected to was Raleigh for a few seconds before the Drift was cut off.

* * *

"I don't understand!" Newt exclaimed, passing back and forth in front of the small group in the pod. "The crew went over every inch of Gipsy. There is nothing to indicate the jaeger's developed a sense of self, none of the parts between now and when we rebuilt her are different aside from regular wear and tear. And we checked the files on all her large hard drives. No memories!"

"But we're seeing them," Mako said. "And this time, I was able to follow it like I can with Raleigh's."

"You shouldn't have done that." Newt heard Tendo chastise her. "What if your consciousness got lost?"

Newt turned it out to turn to Hermann. "What do you think? You're better at all the numbers and programing and such. I got my PHD in biology. What's the 'writing of God' telling you?"

"Nothing. I suppose it's feasible that having being connected to human minds so often and so long that a jeager would mimic the patterns of the human brain. But there is no central processor. The jaeger doesn't even control itself, the pilots do..."

As one, Newt and Hermann turned to look at Mako and Raleigh. Mako was still arguing with Tendo, but Raleigh was brushing his hands over the side panels of the pod. 

"You guys," Newt said, stretching out his arms to encompass Mako and Raleigh, "You guys are Gipsy's brain!"

"Wait, what?" Raleigh shouted, while Marshal Hansen just glared at him in a way that meant explain-yourself-right-now.

"Gipsy having memories, even if she's not really alive, is a feasible occurrence." Hermann began. "It's just stored data. The problem is she's- none of the jaegers are-built to have such a storage area. They are designed to not be able to move unless connected to pilots. You two Drift, and through that Drift control the jaeger. You control the jaeger. You are Gipsy Danger's brain, her CPU. Your brains are where her memories are being stored. Or maybe just Raleigh’s, because he has been piloting her more often and all the extra memories you guys are seeing are from before the move to Hong Kong."

Newt bounced on his heels. "You guys are the next generation wetware!"

"No fucking way," Raleigh said.

* * *

When Mako found him, he was drunk and fifty feet in the air straddling on of the mechanical arms that the crew used to lift them to a spot on Gipsy to repair her. She stood there, way below him with her hands on her hips until he gave her directions to join him. Fifteen minutes later, she swiped the bottle from him to take a swig. She winced at the taste and Raleigh laughed. Gin was not her liquor of choice.

Raleigh had another three sips, Mako none, before she breached the silence. Women, always wanting to talk.

"So, Gipsy's using our brains to story memories."

"Yeah."

"Do you mind?"

Raleigh wanted to say yes, yes he did mind having a stranger use his head for a suitcase. He was not Johnny Mnemonic. But it wasn't really a stranger using his head, it was Gipsy. And he had signed up for that. Sorta. By becoming a ranger and piloting a jaeger. He knew it was his brain that made Gipsy Danger work and a bit of the reverse didn't bother him a whole lot.

"Not really. I just...I think I'm upset it's Gipsy in my head and not Yancy."

Mako toppled over to lean on his shoulder. "You didn't get any of this with her before? Extra memories?"

Raleigh shook his head. "Nothing I noticed. But maybe we did and just thought the memories belonged to the other one of us. It was only knowing they couldn't be yours that made me freak out two months ago."

"Hmm."

They sat still, staring into Gipsy Danger's visor. No one had removed her head from her body like usual, no doubt because of the complications with the Drift they had had. Just behind the visor, Raleigh could make out the Drift tech and foot clamps than enable him and Mako to control Gipsy.

"You still miss your brother, don't you?"

"Do you still miss your father? Or Pentecost?"

The answers were the same for both and neither of them voiced it aloud. 

"It was, nice, to think that I still had a bit of Yancy I could access. I only have photos, but they're not enough. And when we first dropped into Gipsy, the connection and power we could control. We both felt a little like gods. That feeling is gone now, gone with Yancy, and I guess I just wanted to reconnect with the past." Raleigh shrugged.

"Doesn't Drifting with Gipsy do that?"

"Maybe. A little. Still not the same. And it was so sudden I wasn't prepared for it. It felt like an invasion, and that filled my mind first. That, and losing Yancy again."

"But well, it's the future now, isn't? The war's over. We stopped the apocalypse," Mako smiled.

"Yeah. And the future doesn't look to bad." Raleigh turned to smile at her. "Still, it's nice that somethings are the same."

"Like piloting Gipsy Danger?"

"Like the fact I'd still rather die in a jaeger."


End file.
